Amazon steals march on the world with ‘Vesta’ home robots

Hard on the heels of its Echo voice activated device, Amazon is about to turn life on its head again with handy-sized home robots.

Jeff Bezos’ ever-ingenious (and somewhat alarming) empire has a new plan to build a domestic robot – codenamed “Vesta’ after a Roman goddess, not the instant curries of yore – under the supervision of Gregg Zehr who runs Amazon’s Lab126 development unit which produced the Echo and various Amazon Fire devices.

Amazon already uses robots in its distribution centres but these little chaps are different. The first ones might be ready at the end of 2019, so that’s Christmas sorted.

Someone was bound to do it sooner or later but Amazon is much better than its competitors at getting seemingly simple (although highly technological) devices to market at scale. Unlike, say, the Apple Watch it’s easy to see the point of such devices and they’re not premium-priced.